Darren Aronofsky is a genius. So why is his next film going to be 'Wolverine 2'?

Tomorrow sees the release of Black Swan around these parts, and if you’re planning to see it this weekend, brace yourself. Director Darren Aronofsky has some plans for you – his delirious nightmare of a ballet movie has exhilarating dance sequences that could pirouette you right out of your chair, and scenes of nightmarish mutation and mutilation that could stop you from getting back into it. Yep, it’s terrific – and it confirms Aronofsky’s place in the front rank of American directors.

And why not go further? It’s hard not to conclude that he's the leading light of American cinema today. If Paul Thomas Anderson could follow There Will Be Blood within our lifetimes, he could potentially claim the title, but who else is there? Scorsese has his masterpieces but is past his prime. The rest of the movie brat generation – Spielberg, Coppola, and others – are equally long in the tooth, and too wildly inconsistent. Stanley Kubrick is dead. James Cameron is too busy being the Cecil B. DeMille of our time, David Fincher chases Oscars, and the Coen brothers and Quentin Tarantino are far too cool to include anything like a genuine human emotion – who else, then?

Still, we can’t crown Aronofsky only by a process of elimination. What sets him apart from his peers? You can see it in all his films. He’s as committed to the process of making ball-busting cinema as his characters are driven to extremes: there’s a common thread to his protagonist in Pi chasing numbers, Requiem for a Dream’s junkies and their narcotic escape, The Fountain’s probing of mortality (more on that later), or the bodily sacrifices of The Wrestler or Black Swan. Obsession is his theme, and he sticks to it, well, obsessively.

Then there’s the technical mastery – Requiem for a Dream and Pi are masterclasses in stylised filmmaking on the cheap, while The Fountain is one of the few films where special effects are genuinely special. He’s rescued Clint Mansell from the wreckage of indie band Pop Will Eat Itself to become Hollywood’s trendiest composer. Throw in his almost unparalleled facility with actors – he’s coaxed career-best performances from Ellen Burstyn (Requiem), Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler) and now Natalie Portman with nary a nudge or a shrug in sight. The bane of irony, which has descended across young US directors like a plague, doesn’t afflict him – he doesn’t ironically sample genres or undercut every emotion with a throwaway absurdity just to show how clever he is, he takes it seriously, and actors flock to him for rebirth.

His ambition can occasionally be his downfall – but then again, The Fountain may have been much-pilloried for its seeming incoherence and impenetrability, but I do promise you that had it been in Russian, the very same critics who dismissed it on release would be puzzling loudly over it to this day. Even so, it is a flawed film – how could you not fall short of your ambition when you’re juggling three different time periods, with one a conquistador and one a space mystic journeying to a distant nebula, while simultaneously trying to parse the human fear of death? That’s a lot to cram into 96 minutes. What price a director’s cut? Roger Ebert wants one too, and he’s famous.

Anyway. Hopefully I've convinced you that Aronofsky is, at only 41, one of the big boys, and he’s spent more than a decade in the indie trenches proving it. So when news arrived this his next project would be the sequel to X-Men Origins: Wolverine, there was some consternation. OK, a man’s got to eat, but this choice is so left field that we can at best only hope he’ll do a Nolan with Hugh Jackman’s character and give us a Wolverine Begins (although word has it it’s a Japan-set samurai romance, of sorts). We'll have to wait and see. In the meantime, go and watch Black Swan. It’s a cracker.